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It usually starts when I am followed by a business on social media, or spot an interesting share or retweet. I click through to their account for a closer look and to see where they are, and at most I see “UK” or “International”. I click through again to their website and click all over the place for their location and find nothing, or maybe just a mobile phone number with no indication of their whereabouts (and using just a mobile phone number can, in some circumstances, look downright unprofessional).

I work a lot with local businesses, and make a point of using local enterprises as much as possible in my work and personal life; it comes out of a wish to be greener and to support a fellow local business, so it’s frustrating when I can’t see where a company is based.

I do understand that some small companies cover the whole country (or beyond) and do not wish to be seen as tied to one area, but it’s quite easy to state the areas covered on social media and websites. I can also see that it can be a privacy issue especially for a woman working from home, but I’m not suggesting a full address as a town or county will easily suffice. It’s an area that a business might also need to reconsider as their company grows; perhaps there is now an office telephone number that has not been updated to all the webpages, social media sites and online directories.

Diana Morgan Social Media Marketing is now brought to you by solar energy! One of my niche marketing areas is the green sector so I am very pleased to put my money where my mouth is (and save some money on the way).

The installation was completed last Thursday morning and I was impressed to see that the pv panels were generating electricity even on a very dull day. The system has a diverter to fill up our water tank before exporting any excess to the National Grid, so we’ll be saving some gas too.

I’m a member of a team developing a local community energy initiative, Solesco, which is planning to seek shareholders to place pv panels on the roofs of major buildings in the Chichester and Arun districts of West Sussex. I therefore took the advice of a solar energy specialist on the team as to how to choose between the quotations we received. We selected Sunstore of Worthing and are very pleased with their speed and efficiency, especially how they worked around the company installing our new roof.

A frequent offender of the Twitter feed is the automated tweet saying how many people have followed/unfollowed the tweeter. A major reason I feel this way is (and I know I’m not alone in this) is that I simply don’t want to see that sort of post, especially multiplied by the number of people doing it! So, especially if that person tweets very little else, I’ll be inclined to join their unfollower statistics.

Are you guilty of such tweets? It may be that you signed up for it when you first joined Twitter and have since forgotten all about it; simply look at your own tweet stream to see if it’s happening. Justunfollow and similar apps can be found in your Settings. You should be able to turn off the autotweets even if you still want to see the stats.

It’s also worth bearing in mind how you use these stats. Don’t take it personally and automatically stop following someone who has unfollowed you if their tweets are actually of interest to you; they may have any one of a number of reasons, such as reaching their follower limit or having changed focus, rather than necessarily having grown tired of, or taken exception, to your posts. Above all don’t send an angry tweet to someone who has unfollowed you, as someone did to me – it will say more about them than it does about you!

I’ll finish with a handy hint for when you reach your follower limit. Make use of Twitter lists – you can keep someone on a list and still see their tweets even if you’ve unfollowed them. More on Twitter lists in a future post.

Attention to detail is so important to what I do as a social media marketer, and I believe it is one of my traits that my clients most appreciate. I work hard to really get to know what makes my clients and their businesses tick, and a big part of that is picking up on the little things that set them apart from their competitors, or finding posts on social media that may be of interest to them and could bring in new customers of collaborators.

Today I received some very important personal documents and I need to read them carefully, choose options, and return them with some personal ID. I am appalled to see that they’ve got a fundamental detail wrong: my name, despite them having had it on file for 20 years. They have put it down throughout the documents as Diane. My name is not Diane but Diana. Diane is a different name from mine, one I don’t like, and above it is NOT my name. If a financial institution can’t get my name right, what else is it doing wrong?